We are pleased to announce that the 37th annual MIT Mystery Hunt will begin at noon on January 12, 2018 in Kresge Auditorium and will run through 10AM on Monday, January 15, 2018. Wrap-up will take place in Kresge Auditorium at noon on Monday the 15th. We invite you to join us for a fun-filled weekend of puzzles!

Hunt registration will open in a few weeks. There will be no formal limit on team size, but we wanted to note for your planning purposes that this hunt will have fewer puzzles than some recent hunts. It will be optimized for teams of between 20 and 75 hunters. We will have mechanisms in place to ensure smaller teams are having fun and making progress, but if your team is well above 75 hunters, you may have less fun.

Three hotels around MIT -- the Hyatt, the Marriott in Kendall Square, and the Kendall Square Hotel -- are providing reduced pricing on rooms for Hunt participants. The details for each of the room blocks can be found at the bottom of this message. When planning your accommodations, please keep in mind that we will be keeping HQ open until 10AM on Monday, January 15.

Anyway, here is my writeup of my experience this year. As usual, it's way too long, and for some reason this year I'm less coherent than usual. (I was on Up Late; we didn't do so well this time around. That's okay, though.)

My 2015 Hunt writeup It's extraordinarily long (as in I went up against the 65536 character limit) and contains spoilery spoilers, but if you're on this community you probably played in the hunt anyway? Just warning, because Random is going to make one of the rounds available as a book (which I completely didn't work on anyway) and the entire hunt available just on a server to play whenever (though I still don't understand how the logistics of all the things requiring you to be at MIT or interact with characters is going to work), so they requested us not to put spoilers in our writeups, except it's really hard to do. But this was the first year that my team (Up Late) finished, so I really wanted to capture as much as possible.

Admiral Kavouri arrives on the ship for a routine inspection, but Captain Blastoid is not there to meet him. Can the Admiral get to the bottom of this mystery, or will the crew of the Brass Rat drive him skittering up a wall?

Mystery Hunt Design Philosophy It took me a minute to remember that I had a livejournal account that could post things here, but I wrote a (long) blog post about things we strove for in the Alice Shrugged hunt and, as I plan on directing Random to it, I welcome comments/criticisms/etc from other people that have written hunts before (or even just people who have participated in a lot of them). It's less about the logistical considerations (which I'd also like to communicate to Random) and more about general hunt philosophy.

Also, if you haven't noticed, I've slowly been updating the archives and there's some new-ish stuff up, including bonus back-up puzzles that weren't used in the hunt. If you were disappointed by the lack of a Dan Katz wrestling puzzle, then I have good news for you.

Runaround puzzles should be coming soon too, along with photos of events and kickoff and other things.

"Can I ask how you developed your processes? Those too seem very familiar, from the heavy up-front editor involvement, to the two test solve standard, right down to the term "final fact check" (which I remember adding to the puzzle status table late in 2011). I'm curious because Codexians have been wondering how much information is getting passed from team to team, and in what ways. It's really good to see "Puzzletron" (which gained that name from Manic Sages, but was written by Plant in the winter of 2010) continuing to be a key tool, but as far as I know there's no book or even crib sheet for communicating lessons learned. So, while it sounds like your process was pretty similar to ours or Plant's (from whom we got a lot of ideas), I can't tell if that is just coincidence, some kind of general idea osmosis, or specific communications."

I've been participating in the hunt for 11 years now, once as a member of a constructing team (though off-site when we had met with the previous constructing team, so I didn't get to see the cross-team communications), and I'm fascinated about the back-end parts of the hunt. How has the software evolved? How are different teams running things differently (for example, we did fact checking before test solving)? What humorous things have happened during the construction of the hunt? What unforeseen problems have teams encountered? What information has been shared from team to team? If it doesn't exist, can we make a communal body of knowledge about how to run a hunt (and how to not run a hunt)?

If any of this information already exists in a central place (and is being passed down from year to year), it would be great if we could work on amassing this sort of information, just as we're amassing information on old hunts for the archives. I think this sort of information would be interesting and helpful for anyone interested in writing a large-scale hunt.

Mystery Hunt process post I'm not sure how many people are on this comm who haven't written a Hunt before, so most of this is probably old news to most of you. But if you're at all interested in the writing process, I've written up a post about how we managed to turn it around and learn from our 2004 mistakes to write a Hunt that was actually solvable. If any of you read this and think "Well, of COURSE that's what you did, how else would you write a Hunt?" then well, you've just discovered why Time Bandits had problems.

(All opinions contained in this post, of course, are mine and mine alone and may not be shared by other members of Alice Shrugged. I do not claim to speak for the team. Obviously, not all members of Alice Shrugged were members of Kappa Sig! or The French Armada and vice versa, though I speak of them as the same team.)

The Tea Party meta First off, I will join in the near-unanimous praise of the 2014 MIT Mystery Hunt. Very smoothly constructed and administered, and I am grateful for the attention to smaller teams (though my team, Central Services, is neither small nor large, by the current standards). Lots of fun and fair challenge and plenty of satisfying solving experiences.

But, my one big disappointment with our hunt experience is that we spent a huge amount of time fruitlessly trying to solve the Tea Party meta after having gone down a very inviting garden path, and I can't help but want to blame the puzzle presentation for that. We did eventually solve it around 5pm on Sunday, but it involved a lot of hand-holding from Hunt HQ to get us off the wrong path. I am curious to know if any other teams made the same mistake we did, and if anyone has general advice on how to avoid making this kind of mistake and/or how to recover from making this kind of mistake if it's not avoided.

Spaghetti A few months ago, I tried a little experiment: I threw some random words together, told my friends to pretend it was a meta-puzzle, and had them try to solve it. And they did! Some of the "solutions" were downright eerie -- you could almost be fooled into thinking they had solved an actual metapuzzle, and not a bunch of words selected with the help of a random number generator. Other solutions went through absurd convolutions before reaching their answers, and these proved to be equally fun.

And that's how the game of "Spaghetti" was invented. Somebody chooses a buncha words, and everybody else tries to "solve" them.

In honor of the Mystery Hunt starting this week, I thought I'd post a few rounds of Spaghetti on my blog. Come see if you can find a good (or even a bad) answer to a completely fake metapuzzle. Or just read the comments and vote for your favorites.

Here at the Boston GoToVision office we are getting excited about our upcoming Weekend with WarTron launch event and wanted to remind all of our fans that the promotional period will begin at noon EST this coming Sunday, March 3rd. The promotion will consist of a challenge quiz and twenty (20) winning teams will be invited to join GotoVision in Boston, Massachusetts on June 29th for a full weekend of fun activities to celebrate the launch of our new WarTron Game.

Check out our corporate website for more information about the challenge and be sure to check the special events page on Sunday for your chance to win!

The Nature of "Hard" King's Quest V famously has a puzzle in which a rat being chased by a cat runs across the screen. If you fail to notice this and throw a boot at the cat to save the rat then the game becomes unwinnable, though there is no indication of this at the time, nor, indeed, until much, much later. This is, by most contemporary standards, a legendarily bad bit of game design.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world of video games are things like Super Meat Boy and VVVVVV, which delight in cranking up the difficulty level, but have learned to eliminate most of the things that make that really problematic. The penalty for failure is negligible, checkpoints are plentiful, and dying a hundred times trying to make one jump isn't a big deal.

I feel as though this year's Mystery Hunt really highlighted the degree to which we need an aesthetic like this within puzzling. Because my problem with this year's hunt really comes down to the degree to which "really hard" was treated as an inherently good thing.

To pick a puzzle that hasn't gotten much stick yet, Circuitboard. I looked at this and was pretty sure what was going on pretty fast - I recognized the frames from Mega Man and figured it was a weapon susceptibility puzzle. But my reaction upon figuring that out was to walk away because this was absolutely miserable looking. It was going to require tracing lines across a massive grid and then working through a logic puzzle where a mistake was likely to blow up in my face an hour or two later, and with no clear indication of what the error was or how to undo it. There were tons of places where an error could creep in, and tons of ways that the error could remain invisible until late in the solving.

This isn't good. It's not that the scope of Circuitboard is unreasonable, or that anything it specifically asks for is unfair. It's not. The problem is that the puzzle had a preposterously high error penalty. A bigger problem existed with Portals. A chunk of my team spent fourteen hours on it before crashing out at the end because they knew they'd made some error somewhere in the past. That's just not good. Anything that invites fourteen hours of work to be wasted is deeply, deeply flawed.

Another example is Slithering Slumber. I liked this puzzle as an idea, but there's no reason for the snakes game to lack an undo feature. With it being impossible to tell what your next target is, the game amounts to a leap of faith: you have to die repeatedly to solve a puzzle. When this is combined with having to replay five minutes of the puzzle to get back to the spot where you made your error it's just annoying. The lack of undo didn't make the puzzle harder. It just made it longer.

This is a tricky thing to fix, and it requires a lot of thought, simply because the mechanisms to fix it aren't ones that have been invented. If you're making a platformer and cranking up the difficulty level you have mechanisms like fast respawning and infinite lives that people have already come up with. A non-interactive puzzle doesn't straightforwardly have those.

Way back when, Dan Katz posted some guidelines on how to write Konundrums. And one of his big ones were that checksums are good. This is something we should really be taking to heart in puzzle design in general. Solvers shouldn't spend too long trying to figure out if they're doing it right. Getting the a-ha or making progress on the legwork should feel like you're doing it right. Even little things can help here: if you've got a cluephrase, try to phrase it in a way so that most chunks of it look like they're plausibly language. Avoid chunks of letters that look like alphabet soup so that people can tell if their extraction is working (and, more importantly, tell when it's not).

Similarly, avoid bits where a lot of the "challenge" is copying something correctly. So much of what bugged me in Circuitboard is that you have to recopy the grid to work with it, but it's terribly easy to inadvertently miss a path or get twisted and put a path between the wrong boxes. Nothing about Circuitboard would have been harmed by an attached sheet that numbered the boxes and told you what boxes had arrows to what other boxes. It wouldn't have made the puzzle any easier, it just would have made it harder to have a clerical error waste two hours of your life.

Hard puzzles are good. I like hard puzzles. But the challenge should be figuring out what to do, not spending long periods of time wondering if you're doing it right. The act of solving a puzzle should yield feedback from the puzzle on whether progress is being made. It's fine to be stumped. It's not fine to think you're making progress when you're really just wasting your time. And this is something, I think, that we need to learn.

Also, just to dig up a hobby horse of mine for a few years ago, transparent unlocking mechanisms are a good thing. Not just how long to the next unlock, but a clear sense of how solving and unlocking are related and what a solve means for unlocking. Please, please, [Atlas Shrugged], bring this back.